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| It is "new research", but I wouldn't call it a new concern exactly, more like additional supporting evidence to auto-immune and other diseases reported.
There are a lot of similar health concerns about GMOs, some of which I think are stupid or irrelevant, but this RNA thing looks genuine.
An example of stupid concern I often see is the one about antibiotics: Most GMOs are still using antibiotic-resistant markers inserted alongside the desired gene.
After the gene is inserted, the whole cell culture is treated with an heavy dose of antibiotics: The cells that survive are the ones with the inserted gene and antibiotic marker.
That is a quick and easy way to sort out the cells with the expected gene. Some countries are banishing this process to recommend one that does not involve antibiotics but it's more expensive, so GMO seed companies won't adopt it without official regulations.
Monsanto initially said that, according to research, the antibiotics used in the process are supposed to be digested by the animal or human consumer, so it would not affect us.
But that research was not up to date, and antibiotics have been found to survive digestion and penetrate blood in recent research, so detractors say we can develop immunities to antibiotics from GMOs. To which Monsanto answers that they don't use antibiotics used for human treatments, to which GMO detracters say antibiotics belonging to a specific class can cause immunities not just to the same antibiotic but to other antibiotics from the same class, which, together with other issues about antibiotics used in animal feeds, led to regulations listing 7 (I think) classes of antibiotics that are reserved for human medicine and should not be used in animal or vegetal products, and so on, and so on.
All these concerns are true, but antibiotics and other GMO compounds are used only during the initial gene insertion. Later on, these plants are grown normally to study if the gene trait works, and grown at a bigger scale later for seeds. And nobody seems to have checked if these antibiotic markers are still present after these several generations of normal reproduction. All we know is that there is a risk that the antibiotics can still be present, not if the risk turned real or not. It is the same with several other health concerns.
You can't blame the GMO detractors for that though, it's up to the regulation agencies to conduct or contract independent studies, most of the studies that exist are provided by the GMO seed companies, and the few independent ones that for instance reported double death rate of animals fed with GMOs compared to non-GMOs didn't go to this level of details like analyzing for the presence of antibiotic markers.
There are so many unknowns with this technology that I can only agree with the greens when they call it a Frankenstein science.
Planting or even eating GMOs is also playing with the unknown, even if it's hard or quasi impossible to avoid. | |
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We are what we eat
